Cloud-based Message Recall in Exchange Online

Raja_Chinnadurai 
>> In this case the recipient does not know whether the email was recalled or not. Who recalled it and when it recalled?

This is the same behavior as the default Outlook Message Recall behavior that’s existed for > 20 years. Outlook does have an option to disable “Automatically process meeting requests. . .” which will also stop automatically processing Outlook recall requests. But auto-processing recalls is enabled by default so most users would never see the RECALL message in their inbox anyway. When senders recall a message they previously sent most would prefer NOT to notify the recipients to avoid calling attention to their mistake, so for v1 we went with what we believe the majority of senders would prefer.

That said, I get that it can be confusing or unsettling for a recipient to see a message then have it be gone the next time they look at their mail. As such, as I mentioned in previous replies and in the FAQ, we’re looking into a future update to provide some type of notification for recipients. But tenant admins would have control to enable these notifications, it wouldn’t be the default behavior.

>>From a security point of view it is very difficult

Can you elaborate on the security concerns related to the lack of recipient notifications?

AndiZadeh 
>>[no recall outside the org] Doesn't this make this whole thing redudant?

Do you mean irrelevant? Our data show 98% of the millions of recalled messages per day are successfully recalled, with less than 0.02% of the failed ones due to the recipients being outside the organization. That said, we’re exploring a way to give tenant admins the ability to allow recalls from senders in other Exchange Online tenants.

MatthewWong 
>>Recall dialog. . .still said that “if they have not yet read this message”

Yes, the Outlook dialog box is incorrect if the tenant admin allows recalling read messages. If the admin disables recalling read messages, then the dialog aligns with the actual behavior. The Outlook team is focused primarily on the new Outlook and there’s a high bar for updates to the legacy Outlook (e.g. security fixes or major regressions) and this one didn’t meet the bar. Future versions of Outlook coming out soon will address this. Meanwhile, a tenant admin can disable recalling read messages in the EAC > Settings > Mail flow panel so that the dialog and functionality are aligned to apply ONLY to unread messages.

Sulaiman1708 
>> using external smart host message recall won't work, but still I believe message recall report will receive. . . in my tenancy either the message intimation that we try to recall and message recall report not receiving

Yes, the sender/recaller should still get an email notification with a link to the report. Customers who open a support case for not receiving the report email commonly have some mail flow rule set up that blocks, drops, or quarantines the mail. For example, an ETR that blocks messages from External would block the notitication email – it comes from Office365Reports@microsoft.com which is outside your tenancy. Check for any mail flow or AntiSpam rules first, and if you’re still having issues please open a support ticket for it.

abem04 
>> Is there any fix for this or it is safe to say we can't open the Recall Status Message using a shared mailbox?

I mentioned this problem in the FAQ and it’s still not fixed, but we’re actively working on it. I’d hoped we’d have it addressed by the end of 2023, but it might take a bit longer.

SebastianKeller 
>> will I be able to recall a message when it was send BEFORE i activated the futire as a admin in my tenant?

Yes, the cloud-based Recall works for any message in the Sent folder regardless when you sent it.

DavidAnson1955 
>> Do the recipients of the recalled email receive a notification alerting them to the sender recalling the email?

As noted in the FAQ above:
Will the recipient be informed that a message was recalled, especially for read messages?
No, not at this time. It’s under consideration for a future update.

warfieldgb 
>> Losing the ability to recall messages send to people in other organisations is not an improvement.

>> Neither is forcing me to go to a web page in order to know whether a recall failed.

Both of these are items we have on our radar for future possible updates, support for cross-tenant recalls, and integrate the recall status report experience within the email clients. You can just disable the cloud-based Recall and it’ll fall back to classic Outlook recall. 

Set-OrganizationConfig -MessageRecallEnabled $false

>> focus on big companies in which people only talk to each other. . . In the gig economy more and more small businesses like mine will be forced out of the MSFT ecosystem becuase there's something new every week that makes our life just that little bit harder.

Great insight, thank you for sharing that. You’re right, we replaced the classic Outlook feature’s email status notifications for each recipient with the web-based report to address several issues with recalls that only users in large organizations tend to experience: 1) make it easier to consume the results of a recall request for hundreds/thousands of recipients; and 2) support the ability to refresh the results over time for hundreds or thousands of recalls as the results are processed and logged. For users who typically only recall messages sent to a few recipients the legacy Outlook feature’s email notifications for each recipient was fine. As we look to integrate the report experience into the client in the future, we’ll be sure to consider both types of users in our design.

Platty_345 

>>Has this [error accessing the report] been resolved yet?

There are several reasons why this could happen, e.g. shared or delegated mailbox, conditional access rules, etc.  Please open a support ticket with your specific details (include a .HAR file if you can).

>> another way to check if the recall worked?

Yes. Go to EAC > Message Trace > detail panel (or Get-MessageTraceDetail via Powershell) for the RECALL:<original msg subject> message, then on the DROP event  for the message the RecipientStatus field will show you if it failed or succeeded. For example:
EventID                     : DROP
RecipientStatus         : {[Stage: OnPromotedEvent][Agent: Transport Message Recall Agent];Message recall process complete, dropping the recall email. Result:Success, NotificationRequested:False, Mbx:<redacted>}